7.How to Share InDesign Files

2 lessons, 14:47

8.Conclusion

2 lessons, 05:10

5.4 InDesign Tips & Tricks

Hi, everyone. Welcome to the tips and tricks video. It's a mixture of tips and tricks and mainly just filling out this course. Because we've we've got to this stage where we've got lots of empty parts and we've learned lots of the tools we need to use in InDesign. But I guess I just wanted to show you some tips and tricks. But then, we're actually just going to move through and add images and just make this thing a little bit prettier to export, okay? So let's dive in, some tips and tricks, plus just some doing things to make it look nice. All right, first trick is I can import an image and, because I wanna do this image here, right? See it there, the fern? Okay, I could do that, bring it in the way we've been importing file and dragging it out and resizing it. I'll show you the trick that I do. I use my Finder. So on a Mac there is there Finder. PCs have Windows, okay? And I'm just going to move it. There's my exercise files. I'm going to grab image three and just drag it into it. And you can kind of just drag it straight in. It's kinda cool? Another cool trick is, you'll notice if I click the Content Grabber, it's actually, if I zoom out, it's actually quite a big image, okay, cuz it comes in at full size. A nice little trick is click off in the background, click back on this guy, and there's this frame fitting, okay? So it just says fit frame proportionately. And it just scales itself down so that it fits inside of the frame. There's a couple of other options, but the first one's gonna be your best friend, okay? And I know there's a bit of width on there, so I can kind of adjust it, if i want, up to you. Here we go, that looks good. Next thing I wanna do is I'm gonna close down the the little cross in the corner. I'm gonna grab the Line Tool. Don't really need to know how it works, but we're gonna do it here today. I'm gonna turn my Preview back on cuz I want to get it from here all the way across to the sidebar here. And it does it's very best to try and be straight. It's pretty clever that way. If it doesn't, though, you can hold the Shift key down and you can see the Shift key won't let it bend at all. So do that again. Click+hold, drag, hold Shift watch, just snaps it as a straight line, and we good to go all the way on there. I'm going to give it, it doesn't really matter if it has Fill. I'm gonna turn Fill just for OCD reasons, okay? But the Stroke, click on this. We're gonna pick the VNZ red, and I'm gonna increase the stroke white. So I'm gonna zoom in a little bit, get a sense for it. Hit the black arrow, click off in the background, W key. You can kinda see that's roughly what I wanna do. Another little trick I wanna show you is I wanna bring in a little icon, it's a little version of that kiwi that I made for the logo. It's a little fictional company. If you do wanna go visit New Zealand, go to NewZealand.com, brilliant website for all that sorta stuff. But I made a little own brand for this course. So the little kiwi. And I can go to Import &gt; File and that is fine. But I'll show you a cool little trick is if you bring in vector graphics, say something like something made in Adobe Illustrator. We looked at it earlier with this thing here, okay? But I wanna recolor it, okay? So say it's an icon like this particular one. You can just open it up in Illustrator. You don't need much Illustrator skills. So in my Finder, and where is it? Exercise files. I double-clicked Logo two, this AI file, and opened up in Illustrator. There he is. Now, instead of doing it the official way and copying and pasting him, just gonna use my black arrow, select him, go to Edit &gt; Copy. You can use your shortcut. Jump into InDesign. If you are wondering how I'm jumping between these programs, cuz like, how do they come up, it is on a Mac, Cmd+Tab key. Just kind of allows you to, yeah, hold the Cmd key down, hit Tab, and allows you to pick which program you want to jump to. On a PC its Ctrl+Tab, I'm pretty sure. Okay, so I'm in InDesign. I'm gonna go to Edit &gt; Paste. And the difference here is that it's not linked to that original file, which is no big drama. But the real big perk is I can over here with my Fill go I want you to be the VNZ red color. This means you can color. It doesn't work with images, okay, but it works with these vector graphics done in something like Illustrator. Icons, logos, perfect. Work the same if I wanted to recover this logo, okay? If I wanted it to be, I can't do it now, I can't fill it, okay? If I try and fill it with a color, it just fills the background. But if I copied and pasted it from illustrator, I can totally color. All right, this fellow here, I want to go and Object &gt; Transform. I want to flip, horizontal den that's it, all right? Next thing I want to do is, I want to bring in our quote text. So let's go to Import &gt; File. Let's go to text three quote, and drag a nice, big box. One of the weird things you'll notice is that it's probably not doing it for you, okay? But it's gonna happen to you eventually. So whenever I drag out a box, its applying this style VNZ Heading. So to get rid of that, I'm gonna undo, okay? So I've got nothing ready to go. Before I get and start importing text, I go to Window &gt; Styles &gt; Paragraph Styles. And you can kind of see why. See it's selected as VNZ Heading. It's blue, means that every new box that I create's gonna be that. So what am I do just to make things life easier, you could pick Basic Paragraph or the VNZ Body Copy. Either one works for me. And close it down. Just means whenever I import text now it's going to be that style not the giant one. Text 3 Quote. Drag it out. A bit more usable. I'm gonna align it so it's aligning to this right-hand margin. I'm gonna turn my Preview key back off. And what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna pick, what we're using? Didot, I'm gonna use Didot Italic. I'm not. I'm just gonna use the Didot Bold. I'm gonna use the fill color, okay? And remember, unless I have it selected, it's not gonna do exactly what I want when I fill it. Who remembers how I do that? How I make sure the text colors are not the background. You're like, click that one. Yes, that one, okay? Apply to text. Scroll down and I'll use the green. Now, a little shortcut here is font sizings. We looked at it a little bit earlier on. I use this one quite often. I select the text I wanna change the size of. I look down at my keyboard, hold Cmd+Shift key, and hit the Greater Than Key or the period or the full stop, depending on where you are in the world, okay? It gets bigger and bigger. And the comma, or the less than, it's next to M down the bottom of most keyboards, okay. It's just if you hold down, so Cmd+Shift on a Mac, Ctrl+Shift on a PC. And hit period or comma, okay? It should get bigger and smaller, okay? And how big do I want mine? About that. I'm not gonna look at the regular version. If you're not too sure how high the line spacing should be, go to Auto. And InDesign will give you a good kind of starting point at least. You can change it from here, but I'm happy with it. Also gonna do, is I'm gonna select all of you guys, go Right-aligned. I'm gonna make sure you are Roboto. That's a nice little balance of fonts where there's some that is this big kind of display font, which is our Didot, and some which is not. And I want this to be bigger again. So I'm gonna Select All, select all of you. And use my shortcuts. Wanted to kind of break down to three lines. All right, this needs to go down a little bit. So I'm gonna select on this, and I'm going to increase the line spacing. All right, it's looking kinda how I want it. Bring this up. I always find that I've gotta kinda lean back in my chair, hit the W key, lean back in my chair, have nothing selected, and then start looking at it like this. I've got my eyes half squinted, kind of like [SOUND]. And what you need to do as well is don't be afraid to print things off, even if it's going out digitally. Often it's seeing them in a different format can really go wow, that's big, or that doesn't look quiet right. I'm happy enough with it. You can totally skip on now. I'm gonna do the last page just cuz I want it to look nice. You can follow along with me, if you like. Yeah, you can skip on, no new tips or tricks at the moment, just a bit of design-ness getting done. All right, I'm gonna cheat. I'm gonna grab you, cuz I know it's already a third. I've copied it and pasted it using my shortcut. And I'm gonna W key. And I'll work a little faster now. So if you find like you can't keep up, I'm just trying to, I guess give you a sense of the flow that tends to happen while I'm working. Who's the bird? I think it's at number five. So I'm gonna drag him in. Love this little bird. Resize it. I like the way it sits in there. I'm gonna make sure these both hit that margin on this side. I want to set this up at the bottom. Hold Shift to click both of them. And move it to a size. What I might do is, actually this thing in here, I want to cut it so it's in its own Text Document. Cuz what I wanna do is grab the rectangle tool, draw a rectangle all the way along. Actually let's use that full margin down the bottom here, see what it looks like. Rght-click it, Arrange &gt; Send to back. Make sure the fill is nuclear red. I'm gonna grab the Type Tool. Last little tip for the people that hung around, okay? [LAUGH] I never click on the Type Tool. If I wanna get to the Type Tool, I just click the T key on my keyboard. This is kind of out of the scope, we're getting into too many shortcuts, but watch this. If I hover above any of these tools, can you see in brackets, there's the A in this one? This one has V in the brackets. This one, the Type Tool has T. So literally, you can see I'm on the Selection Tool, if I type T on my keyboard, hey, it goes to T. A goes to my Direction Selection Tool. V is my Black Arrow. So when I say go back to the Black Arrow, you'll get used to hitting V on your keyboard. And then back to T for the Type Tool. Try not to drag a box over this cuz I'll show you why. If I click on this, it's gonna fuse my text to this box. It's a pain, it's kind of stuck to it. Often, you want to it be separate. So I'm gonna grab my T key, draw it over here, paste in my text, okay? Then move it in using my black arrow, okay? And what I might do is line it up. Line it up there, line it up there, line it up there. It didn't snap, there we go. Okay, and I'm gonna do Centered. I'm going to do Fill &gt; Fame &gt; Text &gt; Paper. I'm gonna make it Roboto Bold. I'm gonna make the font size a little bigger. And I'm going to lower it down. Beautiful, last thing I'm gonna do is bring in my logo, okay? Again, you could use the proper File &gt; Import. I'm just gonna bring in Logo Black. If you can't make this work because maybe your machine doesn't let you kind of click and drag, or you're finding it a bit tough, just use the, have nothing selected, File &gt; Import. You end up at the same place. Now, resizing, remember, what are the two keys I hold down? Cuz if I don't, the frame just moves. Gotta hold down the Cmd key and the Shift key. Or if you're on a PC, the Ctrl+Shift key. I'm just gonna scale it down, W key on, lean back in my chair, give it the head bob side to side look. [LAUGH] And be like, what do you know, that's a big, okay. And I'm gonna go like that. Nice enough. All right, I thought that was it, there was one last little thing I wanted to do to the cover. And let's resize this. I'm gonna use this to put some text inside. I'll move it over here for the moment. I want this image. I like it as a full kind of background cover. So I've just grabbed the frame and dragged it out. I'm gonna hit the Fit Frame Proportionally button, okay? And then, try and grab the Content Grabber. It's a little bit hard cuz that text is in the way. You might have to move the text box if you're finding it hard to grab. Cool, and this color here is going to host my text. It's just gonna be a nice box here. I'm gonna bring in the text. We could use the File &gt; Import. I'm gonna use my cheap way. So text for cover, drag it out. I'm going to select it all. You're going to be white or paper. You're going to be 16. Lidding's going to be about there. That works for me. Black arrow. Here we go. You'll notice that I didn't go to the black arrow as in, I said, you should always use the V key to get to it. Doesn't work when you have text selected. What's gonna happen if I hit the V key now to get to my Selection Tool? V key. [LAUGH] You got it, okay? There is a way around it, you can get to it another way. Hitting the Esc key gets you to the V key. That's why, if you hold this down or hover above it, you see V or Esc. That's the reason they gave it to the Esc key as well. All right, that's looking fine for me. That is actually it this time. W key, look back, stretch, looks all right. Okay, we're gonna go and Export now. So before I Export, I'd actually print this off and check it to make sure it looks okay in physical form. But you get that idea. Let's move on to the next video where we look at exporting this document.